Hard Times In The Monkeyhouse

The best piece of journalism I've read in the last couple of weeks — and certainly the most perversely fascinating — came from Chris Faraone in the slickly rejiggered Boston Phoenix. It was the story of Nadia Naffe, a woman who signed up into James O'Keefe's ratfking empire only to find herself the eventual target of said ratfking. Faraone's piece is long, but you should read it all, as the kidz say, not just because Faraone is a terrific storyteller, which he is, but also because his story dropped just as the insular universe of rightwing faux-journalism seems to be imploding to all points of the compass.

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(Faraone's story on Naffe appears to be a chunk of an upcoming book. His earlier effort, 99 Nights With The 99 Percent, a collection of his insider reporting on the Occupy movement, is also required reading. I know, I know. You were told there wouldn't be homework.)

First, there was the embarrassing revelation that a host of rightwing bloggers — and one from the port side, Jerome Armstrong — were on the fiddle with the Malaysian government to the tune of almost 400 large. (One of them, Ben Domenech, was a recidivist embarrassment, having previously lost a sweet gig with the endlessly credulous Washington Post because he was a proven thief of other people's work.) Then, last night, it was revealed that Tucker Carlson's vanity project, The Daily Caller, appears to have been caught trying to sucker its audience regarding the tale of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez's patronizing of prostitutes. (TDC is standing by its reporting for the moment, although its explanation is rather heavy with the squid ink.) This is hardly the way you want to celebrate Holy Week commemorating The Passion Of Andrew Breitbart. On the other hand, maybe it is.

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This has been coming for some time. The conservative media establishment is so self-contained as to be positively incestuous, so it can't be any surprise that, sooner or later, there are some two-headed cousins gamboling over the public landscape. There is no internal governor to its enthusiasms; there are only wealthy sugar-daddies pushing the boundaries gleefully outward. There is the very strange and self-fulfilling sense of both victimhood and outlawry, that the people who cash checks from the Koch brothers, or from some shadowy Malaysian fixer, are the true revolutionaries. There has been no accounting because there has been nobody to call them to account, and that is not entirely the fault of the conservative movement. Actual journalists have taken a dive as well.

There's been a little crowing in the establishment media over the accumulated comeuppance. On the liberal MSNBC last night, Lawrence O'Donnell went to dinner on the Menendez material. But return with us now, if you will, to those thrilling days of yesteryear — to the 1990s, to be precise, because that's where it all began, and it began with the complicity, and the active participation, of the respectable press. This is one of those moments in which Bill Clinton must chuckle ruefully to himself before he gets on with his day.

The pursuit of the Clintons — which morphed into the pursuit of the president's penis — is where it all began. It was the late, sainted Tim Russert who enabled the execrable Matt Drudge by putting him on Meet The Press. It was the cable end of NBC News — Chris Matthews, specifically — that put Kathleen Willey on the air and let Willey, whose story even Ken Starr didn't believe, slander an individual to the point where the crazy brother of Pat Buchanan, then an NBC News star himself, showed up at the person's house with a shotgun. It was NBC that allowed itself to be blackjacked by conservative howling into running an interview with Juanita Broaddrick about which NBC had its doubts. eneIf you want to know where the enabling of the renegade mendacity of the conservative media began, look at the work of what Ann Coulter calls "the elves," and how skillfully they mainstreamed every ridiculous theory about the Clintons that emerged from every Arkansas fish camp. And that transferred itself to the 2000 campaign, where every bullshit Republican talking-point about Al Gore got such a thorough airing that we ended up with the eight delightful years of the Avignon Presidency, from which we still are trying to recover. Any reporter who was involved in that fiasco who is presently tut-tutting about Where It All Went Bad — and their editors, and their publishers — should be ashamed of being ashamed.

It was Jake Tapper, now a wealthy TV personality at CNN, who repeatedly stood up for his "sister network," Fox News, which is merely at the top of this carrion-sucking food chain. The head of the White House Correspondents Association — the very pinnacle of the courtier press — is Ed Henry, of Fox News, which is simply not a news operation. It is a high-end propaganda mill that differs from the work of James O'Keefe in that it generally has better production values. The fact is — as Faraone's work demonstrates — that the scandal is not that the kept conservative media is hopelessly dishonest and corrupt, though it is. The scandal is that so much of political journalism is. It is corrupting by hubris. It is corrupted by access. It is corrupted because it continually mistakes its easily manipulated influence for actual power.